Matthew Desmond Quotes
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Substandard housing was a blow to your psychological health, not only because things like dampness, mold, and overcrowding could bring about depression but also because of what living in awful conditions told you about yourself.
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Young mothers who apply for housing assistance in our nation's capital literally could be grandmothers by the time their application is reviewed.
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Most Americans think that the typical low - income family lives in public housing or gets housing assistance. The opposite is true.
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Eviction affects old folks and young folks, sick people and able-bodied people, white communities and African-American communities.
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I wanted to write a book about poverty that wasn't only about the poor. I was looking for some sort of narrative device, a phenomenon that would allow me to draw in a lot of different players. I was like, 'Shoot, eviction does that.'
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Eviction comes with a record. Just like a criminal record can hurt you in the jobs market, eviction can hurt you in the housing market. A lot of landlords turn folks away who have an eviction, and a lot of public housing authorities do the same.
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If you have someone who is paying 88 percent of her income on rent, and we have laws that allow a landlord to evict a tenant who falls behind under those circumstances, eviction becomes an inevitability.
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A community that sees so clearly its own disadvantage or its own hardships also has a harder time seeing its potential: its ability to work together to change the community and change their lives.
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I see myself working in the tradition of sociology and journalism that tries to bear witness to poverty.
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Eviction riots erupted during the Depression, though the number of poor families who faced eviction each year was a fraction of what it is today.
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I came to the realization of how essential a role housing plays in the lives of the poor.
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If poverty persists in America, it is not for lack of resources. We lack something else.
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Public-sector union organisers have told me about how firefighters, police officers, and nurses can no longer afford to live in the cities they serve and protect.
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In college, when I was kind of confronted with facts and figures about inequality in America, a big impulse I had was to go hang out with homeless people around my university and hear them out and understand their situation from their perspective.
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If we continue to tolerate this level of poverty in our cities, and go along with eviction as commonplace in poor neighborhoods, it's not for a lack of resources. It will be a lack of something else.
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You see one eviction, and you're overcome, but then there's another one and another one and another one.
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When you're following people after their eviction, they often start out kind of optimistic, in a way - it's a really tough time, but it's also like a new start. Who knows where they might end up?
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When I talk to booksellers, they tell me how hard it is to hand-sell some of my books because I do keep popping around.
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Why young men from the country become firefighters is hard to explain to people who are not from the country. For most of us, it's not about the rush, which fades with time, or the paycheck. We could earn more working for the railroad or a car dealership. I figure it's about the land.
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Libraries are not just places where people go read a book, but places where an immigrant goes to take English lessons and where folks out of a job search for community.
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Child Protection Services can get all up in your business if you have kids. Just strictly from a business standpoint, kids are a liability to landlords, and they actually provoke evictions.
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All homeowners in America may deduct mortgage interest on their first and second homes.
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Eviction is fundamentally changing the face of poverty.
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Housing is a social issue: how we live and where we live.